NKOTB's Donnie Wahlberg Tweets & Saves a Fan's Life!

Donnie Wahlberg may have fallen into the shadow of his bro Mark (no longer Marky Mark) in recent years, but he still has 183,000+ Twitterfollowers. In fact, one of them recently got the gift of a lifetime from Donnie in the form of a re-tweet. Nope, it wasn't your usual re-tweet of some declaration of fan love for a celeb.

Basically, a few of my Twitter followers retweeted a blog about a fan named Bobbette who was in desperate need of a kidney transplant. So I saw the tweet, read the link, and then re-tweeted and asked for help.

Obviously, if a celeb has your back, you can get more support for ANY cause. But this is a cause that Donnie didn't have any particular reason to support, and yet, thanks to his one little click of the "re-tweet" button, he's changed a young woman's life.

Bobbette's friend Abbie Vicknair couldn't believe that Donnie actually took notice of and retweeted her post:

Back when we found out Bobbette needed a transplant, her kidney was functioning around 20 percent. I knew I had to reach a lot of people in the fastest way possible, so I posted the blog on Twitter. And within two hours, I saw that Donnie retweeted the link. I stopped dead when I read it. I couldn’t believe he did it.

Donnie's re-tweet reached thousands of NKOTB fans and triggered tons of phone calls to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which yielded six matches for BobbetteMiller. The Nashville native is scheduled for a transplant in June!

Even though Donnie is totally a hero for what he did, he won't accept any awards. (Well, I'm sure he'd LOVE a Grammy ... or an Emmy ... or just some little glimmer of the A-list life. Sorry, I digress.) He explained that he thinks of the incident as "a testament to the value of Twitter when used for more than telling people what one is eating for dinner or using it to sell products by tweeting as an #endorser.” Too funny!!

I couldn't agree with Donnie more. The truth is that although it may seem kind of wild and out there that a celeb would pay attention to a tweet from a fan about a friend's need for a kidney, the world is literally shrinking because of these social media tools. What used to be a fortress between fans and celebs has disappeared forever, thanks to Twitter.

And if everyday people are seeing their lives and well-being changed for the better, just because they or their friends are virtually "cozying up" to stars, the masterminds behind Twitter deserve an even bigger pat on the back for the juggernaut they've built.

Are you impressed with what Donnie Wahlberg did for Bobbette Miller or do you think it's really Twitter who deserves the pat on the back?